We've been talking a lot here at ThinkGig about business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR). We've covered how to create a BC/DR strategy and real-life examples of BC/DR in action. Today, we will cover the technology considerations that come into play when managing risk. Again, we turned to our own BC/DR expert, Mike Cybyske. Mike is a crisis manager at Qwest and is responsible for overseeing our corporate Crisis Management Team.

If you missed our previous BC/DR posts, be sure to check these out:

• BC/DR in Action
• How to Create a Business Continuity Strategy

What kind of role does technolog

In our last post, we covered how to create a business continuity strategy. For the next installment in our series, we asked our resident business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) expert, Mike Cybyske, about some specific examples of when BC/DR plans were put into action and what key learnings came out of those experiences. Mike is a crisis manager at Qwest and is responsible for overseeing our corporate Crisis Management Team.

Can you tell us about a time when the BC/DR plan was put into action and what the result was?

Hurricane Ike

Hurricane Ike caused an estimated $38 billion in damages and a power outage that affected more than 2 million people in three states. Fortunately, our network equipment was no

One of the things our customers ask us about most often is how to build a business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) plan. While most customers think of hurricanes and tornados, it's important to note that natural disasters aren't the only thing you need to plan for. There are far more common events like bad software, misconfigured networks and hardware failures that can cause real problems.

To discuss BC/DR, we turned to our resident expert, Mike Cybyske. Mike is a crisis manager at Qwest and is responsible for overseeing our corporate Crisis Management Team. This is the first installment in a series where we'll discuss BC/DR. Today, we cover the strategic elements of a BC/DR strategy. In future pieces, we'll discuss the technology considerations and how to evaluate a solution.

As a business continuity expert for a larg

Is your IT staff prepared to deal with the unthinkable? Imagine for a moment what would happen if your network, and all the systems and applications that rely on it, were suddenly unavailable. Have you considered the impact of this scenario - not only when a disaster strikes, but also when outages are caused by a spike in business activity or a problem with your provider's network?

Here at Qwest, we've developed a framework that enables multiple groups to work together to support business continuity and incident response. We have cross-functional teams tasked with this endeavor and have made disaster recovery and business continuity priorities for our business.

In addition to our own efforts, to help our customers stay ahead of the next unforeseen event, we are always looking for ways to leverage our